The present disclosure relates to media delivery systems and, in particular, to techniques for estimating source resolution of media items that are candidates for distribution.
There are many applications for media distribution in modern commerce. Although applications vary widely, media delivery systems often cause a media item having video or audio/visual content to be delivered from a first networked device (a “distribution server,” for convenience) to a second networked device (a “client”), where it is rendered. Rendering may occur on personal computing devices, for example, personal computers, tablet computers, smartphones and/or personal media players, or it may occur on dedicated media players, such as televisions and/or theater systems. Moreover, the format of the media items may vary widely. The media items may be provided as 720p video, 1080p video, 4K video or any of a variety of different representations. In many cases, a distribution server may possess several copies of a single media item, each at different representations (e.g., 720p, 1080p, 4K, etc.), and it may operate according to policies that attempt to guarantee that the different representations actually meet the quality standards that are attendant to them.
A distribution server may not create the media items that it stores in all cases and, therefore, a proprietor of the distribution server cannot guarantee that a given instance of a media item meets the quality requirements of its associated representation. For example, an instance of a media item may have been uploaded to the distribution server in a first format even though it initially was created in a second, lower-resolution format. Prior to upload, the media item may have been upsampled, converted from a native, lower resolution format to a higher resolution. The upsampled image would be considered to have lower quality than an image that is natively at the higher resolution because the additional pixels in the upsampled image do not contain any detail that was not expressed at the lower resolution.
The inventors, therefore, have identified a need in the art for a tool to analyze a media item and determine whether a media item that is presented was created in at least the resolution in which it is presented.